AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 to the numbers of stateless persons, the authors acknowledge that there are millions of stateless persons globally, which warrants debates and implementation of critical mental health and well-being framework/s that protect them and is centred around them. The adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, called for the right to a nationality to be recognised for the first time as a fundamental right and a right for everyone to enjoy. In 1954, the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons provided the definition of a stateless person. The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides safeguards for States to incorporate within their nationality law to avoid statelessness and toward the realisation of everyone’s right to a nationality. (b) Causes of statelessness Statelessness can be caused by various complex, multi-dimensional and multisystemic factors. The pathways to statelessness may vary from one country to the next, including: ‘(i) political change; (ii) expulsion from territory; (iii) discrimination; (iv) descent-based nationality; (v) withdrawal of nationality; and (vi) laws on birth registration.’15 The three causes of statelessness as adopted, which incorporates the above pathways, are:16 i) State succession-restoration that occurs ‘when an existing State splits into two or more states, when part of a State secedes to form a new State, when territory is transferred from one State to another, or when two or more States unite to form a new state’.17 Statelessness can be linked to colonisation, de-colonisation and consequent nation-building whereby new independent states without pre-colonial national identity have had to deal with borders arbitrarily drawn, dividing and pitting ethnic groups against each other while privileging some and marginalising others, as part of the divide and rule policy.18 The newly formed or independent states may set considerable conditions or define their citizens narrowly, such that many people are rendered stateless and excluded due to their questionable attachments. Examples of this include decolonisation processes in Africa, dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, secession of South Sudan and Eritrea. Persons in these contexts can be at risk or rendered stateless when they fail or are unable to be granted citizenship in the successor states, i.e., political and border changes. ii) Discrimination and arbitrary denial or deprivation of nationality: In this Ajwang’ Warria ‘Stateless transnational migrant children in South Africa: Implications and opportunities for social work intervention’ (2020) 6(2) AHMR 6 at 10. 16 Asako Ejima ‘Ghosts in America: Working towards building a legal framework for stateless individuals in the United States’ (2021) 53(1) Case W. Res. J. Int’l L. 357 at 366, available at https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol53/iss1/13, accessed on 06 April 2022. 17 Asako Ejima (2021) op cit note 16 357 at 365. 18 ISI ‘The world’s stateless’ (2014) 1 at 25, available at https://files.institutesi.org/worldsstateless.pdf, accessed on 06 April 2022. 15 44